Paleozoic basin reactivation and inversion of the underexplored northern North Sea platforms: a cross-border approach

2021 ◽  
pp. SP494-2020-252
Author(s):  
Vittorio Scisciani ◽  
Stefano Patruno ◽  
Nico D'Intino ◽  
Paolo Esestime

AbstractWell penetrations on the UK East Shetland Platform (ESP) prove 1-8 km thick Devonian post-orogenic extensional collapse-related successions. Conversely, extremely thick (1-6 km) Permo-Triassic basin fills without Devono-Carboniferous units were in the past interpreted west of the Utsira High, on the Norwegian Horda Platform and Stord Basin, albeit Pre-Triassic well penetrations are here very rare. In this work, the nature and age of Paleozoic-Triassic strata and structures in these underexplored platform regions are tentatively constrained by performing cross-border regional seismic interpretation east and west of the Viking Graben.We highlight cross-border analogies in structural style and seismic facies, with a similar evolution dominated by polyphase inversion tectonics and structural grain preservation. In the Norwegian study areas, much of the half-graben sedimentary fills may be interpreted as Devonian-?Carboniferous in age as in the ESP, rather than overly thick Permo-Triassic successions. Major graben-bounding extensional faults are low-angle (∼25-33°), approximately northerly-striking and likely rooting downwards into reactivated Caledonian shear zones. Rifting development occurred in multiple episodes, possibly creating different traps. Prior to Permian-Jurassic rifting, many low-angle Caledonian thrusts were subject to extensional inversion in the Devonian and then to Variscan compressional reactivation, causing vertical extrusion and deformation of Devonian syn-rift wedges.


2010 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. MAHER ◽  
A. BRAATHEN

AbstractThe Carboniferous Billefjorden rift basin is a well-known example of a suite of Carboniferous basins on the Barents Shelf and NE Greenland. The basin has a clastic, carbonate and evaporite fill with complex and disputed stratigraphic relationships, especially regarding the Ebbadalen and Minkinfjellet formations. Geometrically, the basin is considered a simple half-graben. A N–S-trending fault and monocline structure within the northern portion of the basin, the Løvehovden fault, has lithological and thickness differences across it within the Minkinfjellet and possibly Ebbadalen formations. The fault shows W-side-down movement, defining a sub-basin within the larger half-graben. Significant along-strike changes occur. Down-throw to the west is at least 150 metres and possibly 400 metres, as shown by across-fault thickness differences of Ebbadalen and/or Minkinfjellet formations. To the east of the fault, the contact between the Ebbadalen and Minkinfjellet formations is a disconformity with significant local relief, and is interpreted to represent exposure from footwall uplift, and associated near- or at-surface solution, producing basal stratiform breccias. A similar contact is not exposed west of the fault. Monoclinal deformation and thickening of the younger Wordiekammen Formation above and across the monocline constrain a later movement component. Kinematic data and the structural style clearly indicate the Løvehovden fault is a normal fault with associated tri-shear zone development, consistent with the regional Carboniferous rift setting. Earlier interpretations describe the Løvehovden fault and monocline as Tertiary contractional features. In contrast, our work advocates that they are an important architectural basin element, defining a sub-basin within the Billeforden Trough during Minkinfjellet Formation deposition, with insignificant, if any, Tertiary reactivation. The Løvehovden fault is aligned with and represents the southern termination of the Lemströmfjellet fault to the north. Thus, the Billefjorden basin changes from a narrow graben to a broader half-graben to the south. These along-strike changes have important implications for the stratigraphic architecture of the basin, and for palaeogeographic reconstructions. These results and application of 3-D models for extension related tri-shear zones may help inform interpretation of other Carboniferous basins on the Barents Shelf.



2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. Green ◽  
Ian R. Duddy ◽  
Peter Japsen

AbstractWe present a consistent synthesis of palaeothermal (apatite fission track analysis (AFTA) and vitrinite reflectance) data from UK Southern North Sea wells with the regional pattern of exhumation defined from sonic velocity data. Cenozoic exhumation across most of the region began in the Paleocene between 63 and 59 Ma. Amounts of removed section are around 1 km across the offshore platform, increasing to 2 km or more on the Sole Pit axis. Neogene exhumation within this area began between 22 and 15 Ma, and led to removal of up to 1 km of section. Along the eastern flank of the Sole Pit axis, sonic data define a pre-Chalk event, and AFTA data from these wells show that exhumation began between 120 and 93 Ma. This timing correlates with events defined from AFTA data in the Sorgenfrei–Tornquist Zone, further east, presumably reflecting a response to regional tectonic stresses. East of the Sole Pit axis, AFTA and sonic velocities suggest that Neogene exhumation dominates, while further east towards the central parts of the North Sea Mesozoic sediments appear to be at maximum burial today except for local effects related to salt movement. The multiple episodes of exhumation and burial defined here have important implications for exploration.



2020 ◽  
pp. 841-842
Author(s):  
David Cabrelli

This chapter evaluates the degree to which employment law facilitates worker participation in corporate decision-making and confers rights upon workers to be informed and consulted about developments in their employer’s business and strategic operations, at both cross-border and national levels. The chapter presents arguments advanced in favour of worker participation, before going on to note how the scope of application of workers’ rights of participation, information, and consultation has expanded over the years—partially in response to the decline in collective bargaining and the power of the trade unions in the UK over the past 40 years or so. Finally, the rights of employees where their employer becomes insolvent or enters into an ...



Author(s):  
David Cabrelli

This chapter evaluates the degree to which employment law facilitates worker participation in corporate decision-making and confers rights upon workers to be informed and consulted about developments in their employer’s business and strategic operations, at both cross-border and national levels. The chapter presents arguments advanced in favour of worker participation, before going on to note how the scope of application of workers’ rights of participation, information, and consultation has expanded over the years—partially in response to the decline in collective bargaining and the power of the trade unions in the UK over the past 40 years or so. Finally, the rights of employees where their employer becomes insolvent or enters into an ...



2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.



2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.



2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Taylor

This paper aims to cast light on contemporary migration rhetoric by integrating historical discourse analysis. I focus on continuity and change in conventionalised metaphorical framings of emigration and immigration in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800 to 2018. The findings show that some metaphors persist throughout the 200-year time period (liquid, object), some are more recent in conventionalised form (animals, invader, weight) while others dropped out of conventionalised use before returning (commodity, guest). Furthermore, we see that the spread of metaphor use goes beyond correlation with migrant naming choices with both emigrants and immigrants occupying similar metaphorical frames historically. However, the analysis also shows that continuity in metaphor use cannot be assumed to correspond to stasis in framing and evaluation as the liquid metaphor is shown to have been more favourable in the past. A dominant frame throughout the period is migrants as an economic resource and the evaluation is determined by the speaker’s perception of control of this resource.



2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.



Author(s):  
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier

The restrained state has always sought to devalue socially reproductive work, often consigning it to the private family unit, where it is viewed as a natural part of female relational roles. This marginalisation of social reproduction adversely affects those performing it and reduces their resilience to vulnerability. The pandemic has largely shattered the liberal illusions of autonomous personhood and state restraint. The reality of our universal embodied vulnerability has now become impossible to ignore, and society’s reliance on socially reproductive work has therefore been pushed into public view. However, the pandemic has also exacerbated harms and pressures for those performing paid and unpaid social reproduction, creating a crisis that demands an urgent state response. As it is argued in this paper, the UK response to date has been inadequate, illustrating an unwillingness to abandon familiar principles of liberal individualism. However, the pandemic has also created a climate of exceptionality, which has prompted even the most neoliberal of states to consider measures that in the past would have been dismissed. In this paper, it is imagined how the state can use this opportunity to become more responsive and improve the resilience of social reproduction workers, both inside and outside the home.



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